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Friday, June 1, 2018

A Look Back At May: Beer, Budgeting, and Debt Reduction

Oh May of 2018. I shall remember thee for your non-stop sunshine, the opportunity to see three - THREE! - different friends as they rolled through town on their late-spring adventures, and the beer.

So. Much. Beer. I blame the visiting friends who insisted on hitting up every brewery in town.

Okay, fine. That might have been me. *I* might have insisted on hitting up every brewery in town. I can't help it. I love beer, I especially love our local beer, and I love to show it off to people who haven't had the pleasure of trying it out. And when the weather's as nice as it's been the past few weeks, it's glorious to sip away on a sun-soaked patio while catching up on each other's lives.

So when I tallied up our expenses this morning, I was fully expecting to find that we'd exceeded our budget for the Miscellaneous fund (the fund we use for spur-of-the-moment purchases throughout the month), and I was fully prepared to blame it on myself. My sense was that we'd (I'd) gone out to eat way more than we (I) normally do and spent way more than usual on food and drinks.

I crunched the numbers and lo and behold, a miracle!: we were under in that area by nearly $15. I gave myself a big pat on the back.

Then I saw the Groceries line and stopped congratulating myself:

Yikes. I'm not quite sure what happened, but as you can see, we blew the grocery budget by $157. I suspect some of that is due to a glut non-food purchases, like toilet paper and mouthwash, that we sometimes buy at the grocery store (that's... a lot of toilet paper). Some of it might be related to the fact that we had friends over for a party, and we bought all of the food for said soiree. Some of it might reflect - you guessed it - more beer (don't worry, I'm doing a dry June, so this will give me an opportunity to see how much we can save when we avoid alcohol). I'm a bit befuddled, as $775 certainly seems more than sufficient for a food budget for three people, but we'll pay closer attention to food expenses in June and try to eliminate any excess.

We were also over budget by $20 on the table we bought from Wayfair. I'm not going to sweat it too much because a) we like the table and b) the order miraculously arrived with all necessary tools and parts, which is a total anomaly. I'll take it.

Other than that, it's worth noting that we had a couple of surprise expenses this month. One was our Amazon Prime subscription, one of the last remaining subscriptions we hold. We order from Amazon frequently, and the amount we save on shipping alone makes it worth the cost. The other was $141 for two fillings at the dentist. Fun. Thanks for never failing to be crappy, teeth.

3 comments:

I was expecting our May to be well over budget. At least that's how it's felt, but lo and behold, we also had a miracle and were only about $100 over in total. There were certainly some specific areas that were high, like prescriptions (always!) and gifts (my daughter moved into a new apartment and we did some "housewarming"). But overall we made it through. Here's to a tighter budget in June!

Awww! I bet your daughter really appreciated those housewarming gifts. That's really nice. June is going to be interesting for us... It's going to be a higher-income month and so the trick will be to not get caught up in that and spend more than we typically spend.

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We're a family of four - Thirtysomething, Fortysomething, the Kiddo, and The Very Expensive Feline - that's racked up $76K in credit card and student loan debt. The plan: To pay it off in a little less than five years. Join us as we budget, save, dream, and reach our goals.